Health Care Information Market: Who Will Fill The Increasing Demand?
Every doctor’s nightmare is the patient who comes in to discuss this or that answer that they Googled up last week. While educated patients are a pleasure to work with, most of the time the material that has been researched leads to badly misinformed patients. This requires hours of work to try to explain urban legends that don’t really work.In some cases, these attempts at rational explanation are met with failure because the internet material sounds a whole lot more promising and “sexy” in some situations, and emotion is more powerful than rational thought. When faced with serious medical problems, this can mean deadly consequences.
Where does that leave us?……It leaves us in extremely urgent need of self regulation instead of the probable creation of additional Draconian policies from regulatory agencies like the FTC. The former sounds like a better deal to me and is both an altruistic people-centered movement as well as a high return-on-investment proposition. The latter is lose-lose and here’s why…
Read MoreFTC Friendly HealthCare Affiliate Marketing?
A few days ago a story broke that the FTC is planning on monitoring blogs and other websites for tainted reviews, a current BIG approach to affiliate marketing in healthcare and other markets. Excellent!!!! Since unwitting consumers are misled daily by reviews that are biased, this is a GREAT thing. For one, we might have more truth in advertising. For another, this is going to be a GOLD RUSH boon for ethical affiliate marketers who know how to position themselves and their products correctly.
So it comes down to this. Assuming you are an ethical online marketer, how do you stay out of harm’s way and/or handcuffs while profiting handsomely?
Picking a HealthCare Niche? Pick Women’s Healthcare!
According to ComScore, second only to consulting physicians, women turn most often to the Internet for health information. Of those women who use the internet, 85% have used it to research health issues and 63% have used it to research birth control specifically.
Overall, in the ComScore research report the internet came in second only to health-care professionals for health information. 82% turn to their doc or other healthcare provider, 60% to the internet and 51% to friends and family.
What topics to pick? Here are some major leaders with searches in multiple millions per month. Many of these topics and complementary available information products and affiliate offers have a large number of women searching for answers: pregnancy, cancer, diabetes, weight loss, fitness and depression.
Helpful hint: Take these and enter them into Google’s Wonder Wheel tool or KWBrowse. You will find more than you can handle as far as niches to explore.
Online Health Information Niche On-Fire!!
According to comScore the online health information niche remains red hot and is getting hotter. Between July 2006 and 2007, the health information category grew 12 percent in overall visits. Between 2007 and 2008, that growth trend almost doubled to 21 percent! This exceeds four times the growth rate of the entire U.S. Internet population. Interested? You MOST definitely should be!!
Why is HealthCare Internet Affiliate Marketing Different?
OK, this might be a very rude newsflash for some, but it REALLY can’t be all about the money in health-care product marketing. You’ve got someone out there buying your ebook or solution or physical product that may have a really big health problem. If you don’t help them, or worse if you screw them up, they lose and YOU lose. If you truly help them out, they’re likely to seek you out so that they can send MORE money to you than you asked for in the first place. This could be your next product or the raving fans in your continuity program upsell. They win, you win. Get the difference?
If this strikes a cord with you, read on. If not, you’re probably not going to want to learn how to make tons of money truly helping people, and you should move on. Don’t pass GO. Don’t collect a lot of inner satisfaction and money. Just move on.